This blog features many contact center industry news stories and also assembles tips for improving agent performance and customer experience, helping teams evolve into world class contact centers. It's an open forum for call center supervisors, agents, vendors and managers to contribute news, stories, anecdotes and other useful information with their peers. Industry vendors and analysts are encouraged to share client success stories.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

* In a customer service survey, only 19 percent of respondents trust completely what brands say on their website. Instead, they rely on reviews on other sites to provide honesty. These will be sites such as TrustAdvisor or G2Crowd.

* Most customers will only tolerate a 1-hour response window. This is regardless of how they reach out (social media, web chat or web contact form).

* Customers are online from early morning until after 10pm. This will likely start to shape new hours of operations for social media and customer service departments and/or increase the use of other digital properties like messenger bots.

Please read the original article on https://www.agilitypr.com/pr-news/public-relations/customer-experience-trends-2018-whats-coming-pike/

Friday, November 03, 2017

This story was originally created on https://www.zendesk.com/blog/providing-great-customer-experience-holiday-rush/

In a Zendesk Research survey, they found that ticket volumes can increase as much as 42% over the holidays. To help keep the annual flurry of customer inquiries manageable, they compiled a list of tips that’ll help your team deflect more tickets and keep holiday CSAT scores high (all of which are capable with the Zendesk platform)1. Build a list (and check it twice)2. Bring the gift of self-service (to your site or mobile app) 3. Bots… the new elves in your support workshop 4. Chat your way to a few more holiday sales5. A few more gifts under the tree

Monday, June 05, 2017

Coordinated Systems, Inc. (CSI), of East Hartford, CT, a member of the Cisco Solution Partner Program is making it incredibly logical for Cisco MediaSense customers to transition seamlessly to a full WFO environment by replacing the MediaSense recording licenses at a discounted price as well as offering the first year of maintenance at no charge.

Included with the Virtual Observer recording license is a complete suite of quality monitoring features including interaction scoring and evaluation, performance and trending reporting with dashboard analytics, agent portal with e-learning, as well as the VO Live set of agent assistance tools, which offer real-time agent screen monitoring, chat assistance and supervisor screen control. The solution also offers agent webcam recording and monitoring for additional performance coaching.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

This informative article was originally published by Steve Brubaker on Infocision.

As a business owner, you have always maintained a traditional, on-site work environment. As such, your contact center has never granted Work-at-Home privileges, and you prefer to hire local — as opposed to remote — customer service Communicators.

While this policy may have suited your contact center in the past, it’s time to ask whether it’s still aligned with the needs and demands of your workers. The business landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and workers today — particularly contact center Communicators — are demanding flexible scheduling policies that allow them to work where they want, and in some cases even when they want.

Rest assured, your contact center won’t be the only one changing its strategy to accommodate its Communicators’ needs. Many customer service administrators are now adjusting their policies and allowing Work-at-Home privileges. According to Gallup, 43 percent of Americans spent at least some time working remotely in 2016. This is an increase of four percent from a previous poll conducted in 2012

Soak that in for a moment: Almost 50 percent of the American workforce is experimenting with teleworking....

Thursday, March 16, 2017

This informative article was originally written by customer experience expert Blake Morgan.

We all have good intentions. We wake up, stretch, brush our teeth and think “it’s going to be a great day!” But as the day goes on some of us get off track. We eat the donuts in the office kitchen, surf Facebook instead of working, make impulse purchases on Amazon and when we get home from work — instead of going to the gym we plant ourselves on the couch for a few episodes of reality TV. We started our day with the best of intentions, but got side-tracked and lost sight of the long-term goals.

It’s the same situation with companies. No company sets out and says, “we’re going to just do the bare minimum for the customer so we can increase our profits!”

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Linda, a contact center supervisor for a large BPO, is at her desk on a Monday afternoon when she has an epiphany. “Something is not right”, she says to herself. “Its Monday and the phones are eerily quiet – too quiet for my center”, she thought.

Linda decides to have a look and walk down to the floor. All her agents are all at their desks, with their headsets on, and all of their stations are active and ready. Everybody is where they need to be, there just isn’t any of the usual call volume right now. Things will change soon, for sure, but Linda wonders “What are they doing with their down time?”.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Saving money is no longer the top reason to implement cloud services, say top CIOs. The use of cloud has evolved so that IT leaders think of it as the tool to help them achieve a wide range of business outcomes.

The number one goal is to provide the best customer experience, especially in the competitive contact center market.